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05 November 2017

Veganizing Favorite Recipes - Stuffed Shells

My Mom and I both enjoy talking about meals that we cook (even though we live 800 miles away) ... it's still a favorite hobby that we share. (Well, that, and our love for small appliances ... but that's another blog post!)

A few days ago, she was telling me about her newest creation, Fire-Roasted Stuffed Shells. It just sounded so good. SO GOOD. My mouth started watering. However, (and this is not something that I discuss so openly and often on this blog), I do have a vegan diet. Stuffed shells are typically not something that one would find on a vegan menu. Well, not the way my Mom was describing them, anyway. Here is her original recipe:

My (awesome & amazing) husband fire-roasted the tomatoes on the grill with some garlic cloves because I cook literally everything with garlic, and I made a quick fire-roasted sauce on the stove that I had simmering for a few hours. I have that recipe if anybody is interested. I wrote it down as I made it since I just made it up as I went along!

Next, as the sauce was simmering, I made the chive and onion cream cheese spread. I used this basic recipe here. I used the Tofutti cream cheese as the base and just stirred everything together.

Lastly, since the recipe called for Parmesan, I used my go-to recipe for vegan Parmesan from Minimalist Baker. It's only 4 ingredients, and super simple.

I used the Barilla Jumbo Shells and boiled them in my jumbo stock pot.

While those were boiling, I went to my herb garden and picked some fresh parsley.

I had to cook up the "ground beef", but since I use Beyond Meat, it only takes 3 minutes. It is made of pea protein. It tastes really good, too.

The recipe calls for an egg as well. Since vegans do not use eggs, I mixed up some of my Ener-G Egg Replacer, and got that ready for the mix.

When everything was ready, I put it into the medium bowl, and gave it a good mix. I used Daiya Mozzarella and Follow Your Heart Shredded Parmesan as a base mix cheese in lieu of the Italian.

The next step was to put a layer of the fire-roasted sauce in the bottom of a glass pan.

Then begin stuffing each shell with your mix! I used a cookie-scoop to get pre-measured amount into each shell. I found that each shell did the best with 2 scoops.

Cover each shell with the remaining fire-roasted sauce.

Cover with foil and then sprinkle with cheese and parsley 10 minutes prior to the end of bake time.

...at the end, you will be left with the most glorious of all vegan stuffed shells. They taste even better than they look. And they look pretty dang good.

Quick Notes

Thanks for all of your kind emails and messages! I am still working on a few changes behind the scenes, but I did implement a few new topics of which YOU are interested-- a DIY section, Good Deals, and new book reviews.

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